Beyond threading basics

Before we introduce parallel programming, concurrency, and async programming with .NET and C#, we have a few more threading concepts to cover. The most important of these is the .NET managed thread pool, which is used by awaited method calls that execute asynchronously in C#.

Managed thread pool

The ThreadPool class in the System.Threading namespace has been part of .NET since the beginning. It provides developers with a pool of worker threads that they can leverage to perform tasks in the background. In fact, that is one of the key characteristics of thread pool threads. They are background threads that run at the default priority. When one of these threads completes its task, it is returned to the pool of available threads to await its next task. You can queue as many tasks to the thread pool as the available memory will support, but the number of active threads is limited by the number that the operating system can allocate to your application, based...